Refuse to Pay Voluntary Payments As Well As Taxes?

Very occasionally, I’ve heard of tax resistance or tax resistance-like
campaigns who have threatened to withhold certain non-governmental, voluntary
payments as well.

For example, the Women’s Freedom League, at the same time its sister society
the Women’s Tax Resistance League was refusing to pay taxes so long as women
were not permitted to vote for their political representatives, resolved “that
Suffragists refuse subscriptions to churches and organised charitable
institutions till the vote is granted, with a view to women making their power
felt and to show the difference their withdrawal from religious and social
work would make.”

And last year, Howard Schultz, the
CEO of
Starbucks, announced that he and the heads of a hundred other large companies
had pledged to withhold campaign contributions from political candidates
“until a fair, bipartisan deal is reached that sets our nation on stronger
long-term fiscal footing.” As the ongoing “fiscal cliff” foofaraw shows, no
such deal was reached. I looked up a handful of the signers of this pledge at
OpenSecrets.org to see if they’d
held to their vow, and it was not very encouraging. Whole Foods chief Walter
Robb, for instance, donated $5,000 to the Democratic National Committee about
ten months after signing the pledge. Tim Armstrong of
AOL donated
$30,000 to the Republican National Committee
between May and September of this
year, along with additional contributions to a senatorial candidate and
to Mitt Romney’s campaign. Mickey Drexler of J Crew donated to several
Democratic Party organizations this year. Campaign organizer Howard Schultz
himself couldn’t resist the temptation to drop $1,000 into Congresswoman Nita
Lowey’s campaign bucket.

However another clever fellow came up with a plan to get money out of
politics. Dubbed Repledge, it works
like this:

We connect individual contributors who agree to transform their political
contributions into charitable donations if a supporter of the opposing
political candidate matches the contribution.

This way, people can divert their political contributions to more useful
purposes without feeling that they’re thereby empowering even worse
politicians than they ones they had been intending to feed.

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